be productive, b-e productive

today was a great work day at the studio. right now i’m obsessed with slump molds. i’ve been using some i borrowed from b to make my wall pieces and had been meaning to pour my own for a month or so now and today i powered through three of each size. i also rolled slabs for all the slump molds i already have (also did this yesterday) and now i have 7 slumped slabs ready to build wall pieces from. friday night i got a few more wall pieces out of a bisque fire and my collection of bisqued wall pieces in growing. i need to glaze these puppies and get them up on my etsy site asap (but trying to quiet the internal critic, it’ll get done). once i get the photos done i can get them up on my retail shelf at the clay co and hopefully make some cash.

anyway, i also worked on a little birthday present project for my brother. he requested a garlic shaped wall hanging with the words “garlic isn’t a spice, it’s a vegetable.” inscribed. today i rolled out some luscious porcelain which i trimmed into a stylized head of garlic embellished with some simple lines. i had intended to stamp the words (with stamps also borrowed from b right into the garlic but i stamped up some scraps to start blocking out the words and it looked so cute that i decided to stamp the phrase out on little slabs of clay which i attached separately to the garlic.

while this garlic isn’t cutting edge art but i have to say i really enjoyed getting a request and executing it. kitch is so satisfying! sometimes it can feel so difficult to make what’s in your head come out of the clay. it feels like doing some kind of math problem but there are no signs for multiply or subtract. like j said one night when she was working on her coils and i was working on my belly buttons “you just have to roll them until they’re right.” i think folks who are really successful have found a systematic way to extract their visions and that i’m still very green artistically, working intuitively but needing to move to the next step. i’ve always had this fascination with idiot savants though so maybe that’s what i’m going for……

ideas for my next body of work are congealing and i think i will start posting pictures again soon.

p.s. just a note on new year’s resolutions i haven’t failed at: today from about 4-6 pm i took a break to bike up the pinellas trail a bit with k. we’ve been trying to go every week and it’s really delightful. we’re doing 6-10 miles in a couple of hours, which isn’t too bad for beginners (of course there are a lot of hard core bikers on the trail, flying by us and i did get yelled at the first day for meandering over into the passing lane while chatting with k and m-“trail! trail! heh heh) and we’re improving! and it feels great! physical activity just can not be beat!